It was recently unveiled that U.S. Navy sailors aboard the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan during the time of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster suffered severe radiation poisoning after being left out to sea for months without aid. And new reports indicate that the cause of this nightmarish situation for these unfortunate sailors — radioactive steam from the melted reactor cores at Fukushima — is still billowing from the stricken plant some three years later.

Navy sailor Lindsay Cooper, 24, recently shared the horrific events of that time with the New York Post (NYPost), which just before Christmas broke the story publicly. It was a brisk day in March, just days after Fukushima was stricken by a tsunami that resulted in three of its six reactor cores literally melting into the earth, when Cooper and her colleagues got their first taste of what happens as a result of radiation exposure.

“I was standing on the flight deck, and we felt this warm gust of air, and, suddenly, it was snowing,” recalled Cooper to the NYPost, explaining how at the time nobody knew what to make of the situation. “We joked about it: ‘Hey, it’s radioactive snow!’ I took pictures and video.”

But the jokes quickly stopped after Navy crew members quickly began to fall ill. As it turns out, the ship had been drifting in radioactive water for several days prior to being engulfed in what would later be identified as a cloud of radioactive steam from Fukushima. According to reports, the ship’s desalinization system had been quietly dispensing radioactive water through the faucets and showers, exposing everyone on board to what would soon become a type of hell on Earth.

“People were s–tting themselves in the hallways,” recalled Cooper, noting that many of the crew members on the ship had been suffering from extreme diarrhea. “Two weeks after that, my lymph nodes in my neck were swollen. By July, my thyroid shut down.”

The worst part about the situation is that the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan had been specifically sent to the Fukushima region to provide aid. But before it could even arrive, it inadvertently traveled directly into the eye of the radioactive storm, leading to at least 70 cases of radiation poisoning and some 35 cases of cancer.

“We’re seeing leukemia, testicular cancer and unremitting gynecological bleeding requiring transfusions and other intervention,” stated Paul Garner, a lawyer representing Cooper and 50 other crew members who are suing the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). “Then you have thyroid polyps and other thyroid diseases.”

A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Fukushima still spewing the same types of radiation that harmed Navy crew members

The U.S. government, meanwhile, did nothing to try to help all those desperately ill Navy crew members, who were helplessly stranded at sea for months with no ports willing to accept them. While their ship was eventually allowed to dock in Thailand, the damage had already been done.

“The most advanced military in the world and they were just left stranded? Who would do such a thing to their own people?” asks one angry commenter over at ENENews.com.

“Fire each and every Navy officer who had anything to do with perpetuating this monstrosity for two-and-a-half months,” adds another obviously incensed commenter.

As far as the current state of Fukushima, reports issued just days after the Navy story first broke headlines revealed that “mysterious” steam is still flowing from Fukushima’s Unit 3 reactor. An English translation of a TEPCO press release confirms that likely-radioactive steam is continuing to billow from the shuttered reactor, potentially spewing massive volumes of deadly particles into the atmosphere.